So unfortunately I wasn't able to raise enough money for some short movies for the "Manly Show" but I've been kicking around some ideas an old one and a new one.
This is a character test for the new idea
and here's the step by step making of
Hopefully I can finish it in less than 5 years unlike my other film Porcelain.
It will also have less psychic powers and tentacles and instead have emotions and feelings.
I'm liking using the extra lines for expressions but not 100% happy with my line work (which was always going to be rough). I might experiment with no outlines (although I feel that's a little played out now) or textured lines and either pushing a more stylised face or trying a few more realistic faces.
I really want to capture a 30+ older and more ordinary look as I want to tell a story about people in this age group. Drawing on my own experiences and friends.
It's still early days to be talking about the story I'm just trying to get a few of the characters together and then let them affect some of the scripts choices.
Well I'll talk about this and the other idea more when there's stuff to show.
As for the fate of the "Manly Show" well we won't be making the films but the tumblr is still a go.
I made an animated gif the other day that was pretty cool
Punching a tree into the sky, fighting on eagles, face melting guitar and aircraft carrier surfing robots. We're trying to raise some $$ to bring this world to life
Three stories of Might and Manliness, three Super Sexy Synopsis’s:
Manly Firemen, fresh from their sexy calendar shoot, tackle the ever-increasing threat of a pyromaniac, a city on fire, orphans and orphans on fire. Not necessarily in that order.
Like an Interview with a Vampire, only He wears a suit of armour chucks a bloody great big net at dragons for a living and rarely cries about it.
An overly enthusiastic body builder refuses to follow the trend of working on his thumb muscles by buying the latest mobile phone. Everyone thinks he’s crazy, but the girl from a ruined future thinks he’s doing the right thing. Right on!
Three times more masculine than every single film with Carl Weathers in it!
Three times more manly than a beer-fuelled trip down a waterfall, without the raft!!
These are the three face-punching, arm-flexing animated shorts that you need and need with luke-warm bourbon – straight up…no ice!
Hey everybody my good friends Christien Clegg, Adrian Tolman and I are trying to raise $5,000 to make 3 manly short films.
I hope you can help us achieve this as we promise to put every single dollar into making the greatest animated short films possible. They laugh out loud funny, stylistically gorgeous and despite the absurd surreality they with have really clever little stories.
Another year another fantastic venue and turn out for the 24 hour comic challenge in Perth.
A twist on this years challenge we had to use the name of a song to inspire our comics. "I'm deranged" by David Bowie from the Lost Highway soundtrack was my ear worm for that morning
What did you think? I was pretty happy with it. I enjoyed the freedom of not taking it too seriously and just having fun drawing. I even got one of the Manly Show super buff dudes in there. (I love that photo realistic picture of me doing the 24hr comic that Christien drew)
I drew this on glossy A5 paper (I guillotined and halved A4 sheets before the event) as I knew that paper likes ink pens. I wore my glove that I have for my cintiq as I knew my hand would be a bit grippy on the gloss paper. I loosely pencilled it with a H pencil. I found the faster and looser I drew the better to ink from. My pens were a small, a mid and a brush pen. I tried to use the different thicknesses to give the scene depth. I also had 2 different grey markers, a warm and a cool grey. I tried to use the different colours to separate the characters from the background. Occasionally I'd mix up the colours due to tiredness.
Working smaller I was able to produce more pages faster and starting from 10am I was able to have all my pages done by 3am the next day. This is the first time I've managed to finish with time to spare. I also felt I was able to keep the drawings pretty consistent I may have stopped drawing detailed trees for awhile but the character work I was happy with the whole way through.
This character was based on a cultural statue I saw while I was over in Kuching last month. It had a cat that looks pretty much like how I've drawn him being attacked by a similar styled dog/dragon. I wasn't allowed to take photos in the museum but I drew these while I was over there.
This guy is super fun to draw and the 24 hour challenge gave me an opportunity to bring him to life. That's why these events are so much fun. They just force work out of you.
Well another 24 hour comic done. Super extreme thanks to Chris Maximum Markle for organizing it again.
The next thing coming up in a few weeks the 48hr animation challenge!!!! Man I must hate sleeping.
I also need to find a job at some point. My freelancing is only just keeping the wolf at bay. Such is my glorious life as an artist haha
Sorry for the lack of updates here but keep reading the Manly Show. Christien has been drawing up a storm there that keeps challenging me to draw men with the shortest shorts and the largest nipples... heh. Seriously check it. It's the best website in the world!!
I watched Spiderman on Tuesday and just seeing him move and swing through the city inspired me to draw.
My first sketch I did while out at the Zoo
Second sketch done on my iPad
After a few scribbles I felt like doing a simple fun animation.
I really want to do more with Spiderman. I also just watched the latest Batman so maybe I'll do something with him.
Oh as for my last post on what happened with my oil painting, there was a lot of swearing and cursing as things stopped working out but I did complete the painting. I'll update that soon. Even though the painting is hanging on the wall I might touch up a few areas before it's finished finished.
This post will be about a painting I'm working on.
So far I have this scribble
So this above drawing was based on an earlier sketch that I unearthed while I've been moving house
I had been doing a few sketches in photoshop trying to plan out the image but nothing really felt that great. Like the Mr Gough world that exists in my head so it was great to come across this image.
Here are some of the earlier photoshop sketches. You'll notice the fishing monster was the one thing I was happy with.
The second one I was almost ok with. Having a Mr Gough floating in ice. I did like the tree zombies I created but I couldn't work them into the new image.
Oh I should give a little backstory. Mr Gough was a small little comic that was born in my sketch book. I really liked it and I ended up making an animated short with him. The short won quite a few awards so he's stayed a favourite character of mine. He usually makes cameos in my other films as well.
I added in the little orange monster from the short on top of the round trees. No Monkeybears though
So I tweaked and changed that original drawing in photoshop but it's going to become a painting so this is how I'm transferring the image onto the canvas.
After printing the image I attached one of the sides to the canvas turned the image over and covered the back with black charcoal
I then folded over the paper over the canvas
Then using a blunt pencil I traced over the lines
This hurts my hand as I have to draw without leaning on the page. When I finish (I haven't yet) tracing all the lines I can fold back the paper and see the image has been transferred. Here's what it looks like so far
I'll spray that with some fixative to hold the charcoal and then it will be time to begin the under painting (at least I think that's what I'm doing)
Ok so here's the finished transfer
Which is pretty close to the original drawing. The paper buckled a bit and moved some of the drawing around but nothing too drastic.
So now I'm beginning to tone the image. Because it's winter I'm using blue tone for my under paint. Actually I'm not sure if this is really "under painting" much like when a client asks if we could "storyboard" the idea when he really means brainstorm the idea or calling a corporate video a documentary (my favourite term misuse).
I'm trying to work really light and that means using more turps than oil paint. I noticed that some of the transfered areas aren't dark enough for me to see details (such as the tree behind the rock on the right) and I'll need to let the oils dry a bit and maybe pencil the lines a bit darker.
Will oils you have to build up the paint a bit otherwise you'll have the white of the canvas showing through and that looks crappy. This canvas I'm using is a bit iffy as well. Some areas were hard and it was repelling the paint a bit.
Anyway still a heap of stuff to do. I'm also trying to jump between this, some writing and some flash work. This tree I've been slowly working on for a week or so now (I get distracted too easily these days)
Here's the final painting. It took awhile to get teh colours I wanted and there's probably a few colour's I'd like to photoshop change haha but that's the fun of non digtal art. The rawness of it all
If you haven't seen it yet this is my new film I was talking about yesterday. The guidelines of the film was that we had to incorporate this character...
and use a section out of a supplied music track by Pippin Kenworthy.
I was tempted to use the more abstract heavy part of the track at the start but I really loved the melancholy section in the middle. As I was working on the film listening to the track over and over I heard the whistles blowing at the end which made me think of the Chuck Jones sheepdog shorts. So that's why the ending is what it is. There's also 2 possible ways to read what the ending is which is something I quite like.
Anyway here are my early sketches and thumbnails
This was the first drawing of the wolf I did. I loved the simplicity of the drawing style. For some reason I ended up shrinking the head and making him more wolf like. I wish I kept those fangs. I think everything changed when I did that shot of him eating lamb chops.
These are my thumbnails of the film. I kept reasonably close to them except for the ending
In the ending the sheep dog and the wolf were going to be bros and the sheep dog just comes over bringing a coffee/tea and he just consoles the wolf. The deadline for the entry was getting really close and that whole handing over the coffee thing was going to be a bit tricky so I skipped that. Also because of how I framed the shot the hand on the back didn't look great so the sheep dogs hand went on the wolfs hand but then that looked like something else and since that made me laugh that's why the ending is what it is.
Something you may have missed is that the wolf goes to work and comes home with a bloody sheep in the back of the car. So with the ending there's 2 possible things, either what most people will see is the sheep dog is making a pass at the wolf or the other ending is that the sheep dog has finally caught the wolf who's been killing all the sheep.
So that's the skinny about my 'Lonely Wolf' short film. It ended up winning an award at the competition I entered it in. It picked up the prize for "outstanding animation" and won me a new wacom. Roseline also won an award for story I think although it might have been illustration and she won vouchers for art supplies. Since I have a cintiq and Rose needs to update her intous 2 we just switched our prizes. I'm going to buy me some more oil paints!!!
Well there's another film that should be on the mondo channel soon that I worked on called "Probed". I'm not sure when that is going to be online but I'll do another post when it is
Well I made a new film and it should be screening tonight as part of Animators Hour on the Northbridge Piazza Super Screen. I'll also be putting the film on my Youtube channel tomorrow morning.
It's a very short film as it was only meant to be 30seconds and it had to use the music provided but I crammed it with as much stuff as possible... maybe too much.
Anyway here are some stills
It felt like a return to the original sort of short films I used to make before I started earning money working on other peoples shows and other commercial jobs. Those were some fun times but not really something I can afford to do as much as I could when I was younger.
Technical stuff, the backgrounds were done in photoshop, the animation was done in toonboom and grading added in after effects. I tried to approach this with as little animation as possible and more focusing on the illustrations carrying the film. I tried to have a lot of foreground, midground, midback, farback, layout set ups as well as a slight camera hand held drift. Tell me if it works tomorrow
The Animators hour is here (see below) and it starts at 8:30pm - 9:30pm
I've heard there might even be something new from Roseline in it :)
Here's my loop submission for this months loopdeloop
I've been reading a bunch of X-men comics lately and I'm pretty sure you can tell by looking at this haha
It wasn't my initial idea for this theme. I just woke up one morning and just started pressing random buttons on Garageband ipad and came up with this goofy song loop. I then animated loosely based on/inspired by the music straight ahead in toonboom animate.
It turned out to be a fun experiment animating 2d effects. When I was animating the effects I tried to feel the effect more than to plan it out. I tried to force myself to draw big confident strokes and solid shapes and not over work the drawing.
The line I used for this was a square brush with pressure. I really love the feel of that line! It feels like paints or ink and it's great to work really bold and messy.
The character design I wanted to keep really pulpy with flat colours and black. I worked in shapes and details that would help define limbs as I knew there was going to be that rotation but also so you can see what's going on when she gets really small in the background.
You can head over here and give it some star ratings today and tomorrow... 350 star ratings so I can win hahaha
You definitely should head to the website though and check out the loops this month there's been over 50 submissions and lots and lots of really great ones.
I've been doing a bunch of backgrounds in photoshop lately here's some from an unreleased film that was finished last week.
This is a working progress for a short animation (keeping this secret just in case I don't finish it)
That floor texture I made for my film Porcelain that I'm constantly adjusting and recolouring to reuse every time there's a wooden floor. I also have some glass textures I made for windows from Porcelain that I also reuse heavily.
This WIP background is for an animation pitch I'm working on set in my hometown forests
I'll try to update this background every day until I finish it. I thought it was good to show at this stage as you can see my layout lines and layer breakdowns (different colours represent different layers). This was something of a style experiment I might simplify everything once I do a detailed study. The layout is pretty boring but when I put the two characters in and fire up the depth of field effects it should look ok.
Oh here's an old background I did for Roseline's loop de loop that has been sitting in my draft posts for forever.
UPDATE 13th of March
So I sketched out the main midground section which the characters interact with
after doing the sketch it was like "...ok now how the heck am I supposed to colour that???"
This is what I have done so far and I'll continue it tomorrow. I guess it will have a slight water colour feel to it. I'm not sure. Today I like it and think it will work
UPDATE 14th of March
Ok this is pretty much done and I'm not completely happy with it but for a first style test it will do
There's things about the colouring I really like. Such as the little red and yellow scattered leaves I think offset the pallet just enough so it isn't boring. The balancing of detail and space are ok but not really that imaginative. I think the default way I draw is looking slightly down so for my next tests I really should play with my camera angles a bit. I also want to push things and also simplify and simplify! This was a test where I'm just getting a feel for the environment but now its time to look at it with my producers hat on and see how to approach this better.
I might do an update tomorrow where I'll add in the characters
